French television service provider CANAL+ recently announced that it has selected Telestream’s Vantage workflow automation platform running on Lightspeed Servers with Pipeline encoding appliances for its deployment of a new VOD catch-up service. The opportunity to expand services at CANAL+ arose in 2012 when two Free-to-air channels became available on the French DTT platform. With regulatory approval in September, a contract signed in October, and an on-air date before the end of the year, deployment had to be fast.

For CANAL+, it was important that the new services also be available online and on mobile devices, as part of the company’s aggressive multi-platform strategy. The plan was to create a new building with all new infrastructure in a short timescale in order to broadcast its three Free-to-air channels: D8 and D17, which had just been acquired, and i>TELE, which already existed in the CANAL+ Group.

This was a challenging encoding task, bundled with complex additional processing, which needed to be implemented within an automated workflow, and all to be achieved in a tight timescale.